Alice Waters is so confident about the power of good food, she regularly offers this challenge: "Give me any kid. In six weeks, they'll be eating chard."

In July, Waters got 10,000 kids. She persuaded the Berkeley Unified School District to offer academic credit for lunch.

The proposal, which the founder of Berkeley's pioneering Chez Panisse restaurant has backed with a $3.8 million startup grant from her foundation, is the first of its kind in the nation. If Waters is right, the approach not only will teach children to love Swiss chard, but also could revolutionize the relationship between schools and food.

Over the course of the next two years, Berkeley educators will write a curriculum in which measuring a garden plot might become a math lesson. Kids could learn science by seeing how molecules expand to make a loaf of bread rise. Local, sustainable farms will supply food for school lunches, and, in turn, students can learn economics by studying the business of sustainable farming.

And every school day, children will be taught the value of cooking a meal and eating it together.

"This is not just changing the food in the cafeteria and making that an educational experience. This is for every single child. It's a core curriculum," said Waters, who trained as a Montessori teacher before she opened Chez Panisse in 1971.

"Instead of just fueling up so we can live our lives, food has to be part of our lives, an enrichment of our lives that is connected to history and culture and time and place. And that must begin at the very earliest stage," she said.

Radical idea

Supporters say the notion of infusing food into a school's academic curriculum is so radical and well timed that it could be just the thing that saves a nation in nutritional crisis.

"Lunch has been somewhat divorced from the school day," said Neal Smith, the district's curriculum director. "Teachers have their own lunchtime, and kids are sent off to make their own choices. Now, in light of the obesity crisis, we're trying to reclaim that time and look at it as learning."

Detractors say the plan is just one more precious Berkeley idea that doesn't stand a chance in a state with a shrinking pool of educational dollars and students struggling to perform better on mandated proficiency tests.

California's classrooms are among the most overcrowded in the nation. One million students attend schools with bathrooms that don't work. This spring, 57 districts filed reports with the state warning they will not or may not be able to pay their bills sometime during the next two or three years, an outcome that would force the districts to turn control over to the state in return for a financial bailout.

But this is Alice Waters, food visionary. The mother of California cuisine. The woman who came this close to talking former President Bill Clinton into establishing an official organic garden at the White House.

People who shop at the more than 3,000 farmers' markets in this country can thank Waters, whose early support of locally grown, organic food led directly to the explosion in the number of markets.

The 2000 national organic standards law was lifted almost directly from California's own organic regulations, which were developed by farmers who found their first showcase at Chez Panisse.

Bill Niman of Niman Ranch, the nation's premier seller of environmentally sound, naturally raised beef and pork, sold his first sides of beef to Chez Panisse. Now his multimillion-dollar Oakland company is selling its pork to fast-food chains like Chipotle Mexican Grill, which is 90 percent owned by McDonald's.

Can it succeed?

The question is whether she can do for an entire school system what she did for organic food and regional cooking.

Waters began the project a decade ago, when she adopted Martin Luther King Middle School and, along with the Center for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley, developed the Edible School Yard to turn a patch of asphalt next to the school into a garden and a teaching tool. Since then, every school in Berkeley has developed a garden plot. In addition, the Center for Ecoliteracy has created Rethinking School Lunch, a how-to guide for midsize school districts that want to start a farm-to-school program.

The proposal to infuse gardening and lunch into Berkeley's core curriculum is an outgrowth of that early collaboration.

"I just thought it was going to provide a school food. I had no idea it would become what it has become," said Waters. "I hadn't been inside a school for 30 years when this all started. It's appalling what is passing for food in schools. People need to wake up."

Some education experts say the idea of teaching schoolchildren about food isn't all that radical.

Home ec, driver's ed and classes like music appreciation are usually elective, called "add-ons" by educators. It's easier to create an add-on than make wholesale changes to a class like English or math, Kirst said.

Challenging process

Doing what Waters wants to do -- actually integrating food into every aspect of learning -- is much more challenging, because measurable success is hard to track.

"How will you really know what those teachers are doing with all those programs in food when you can't monitor it?" said Kirst. "Say I am a social studies teacher, and you're asking me to teach the history of food, and I want to teach the Civil War. How do you know that I did it? How do you test for it?"

Zenobia Barlow, executive director of the Center for Ecoliteracy, has worked with Waters from the start, and has an answer for that. "The Civil War was fought over agriculture."

Besides, she points out, districtwide curriculum rollouts aren't anything new, and the subjects of the new curriculum -- farming and food -- are familiar.

"It's not like we're trying to teach Swahili," she said.

The bottom line is that the schools can't afford to ignore food.

"We can pretend there aren't any ramifications from our disassociation with food, but schools are having to deal with insulin injections and obese children every day," Barlow said. "Even the most temporary shortfall in nutrition has profound implications in a child's ability to learn."

Waters never intended to be associated with a health project. "This project is associated with food, and the outcome is health," she said.

Still, the nation's obesity crisis gave Waters and the Berkeley schools advocates the opening they needed to make the proposal seem more a life raft than a Left Coast dream.

"We have an obesity crisis, and we don't have any fundamental way to address it except putting Band-Aids on it," Waters said. "We need to address it fundamentally deep down, and this is an idea to do that."

Must maintain standards

The key, education experts said, will be to make sure that the components of the new curriculum meet the state's academic content standards, which outline what needs to be taught at each grade level. In the sixth grade, for example, students are required to learn about thermal energy for earth science. A lesson using the steaming of vegetables as an example could be used to meet that requirement.

Waters is leaving those kinds of details to the educators in Berkeley, who have been meeting this month to start writing the curriculum. The process is a long one, beginning with small workshops examining what kind of measurable outcomes to create. Over the course of the year, consultants will work with interested teachers and administrators to build the framework for the new way of teaching.

To those who say it can't be done, Waters points to physical education, which public schools took up in the early 1900s. "We built gymnasiums. We bought equipment for the track. We got teachers to teach it. We got uniforms and lockers and everything else that was involved in physical education, and kids got better for it because it was important enough to do that," she said.

Neither is she entertaining naysayers who worry about a lack of money.

"I won't hear that. I won't accept that, because we have to change the paradigm on how we spend money in this country," she said. "How much do we spend on health care? And (it's) health problems that are caused by how we live."

$5 million project

The money from Waters' Chez Panisse Foundation, which funds community- and youth-oriented projects that emphasize the links between what's in the field and what's on the plate, is only a start. More money will be needed to take the program from a pilot beginning in three schools in 2006 to a comprehensive districtwide curriculum. Barlow estimates it will take an additional $5 million to get the new curriculum into all the Berkeley schools.

Already, backers of a new obesity center planned at Children's Hospital and Research Center in Oakland have signed on in an effort to attract grants from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and federal agencies. Dr. Janet King, director of nutrition at the hospital and head of the committee of scientists who just finished writing the 2005 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, is heading the project.

Then there is that other little hurdle -- getting the kids to actually eat healthy food.

Waters just falls back on her chard challenge.

"Something changes when children participate in the ritual of eating, the ritual of the land," she said. "Food that is economical and nutritious and delicious also gives another outcome, which is a nurtured human being."